logo Sign In

Post #1307345

Author
CatBus
Parent topic
Project Threepio (Star Wars OOT subtitles)
Link to post in topic
https://originaltrilogy.com/post/id/1307345/action/topic#1307345
Date created
25-Nov-2019, 12:58 AM

Not exactly. The letters of the matching subtitles fonts are designed to very closely match the 35mm theatrical appearance of every letter as it appeared in the trilogy. For example, the letter “z” doesn’t show up in any of the English subtitles, but the German prints used the same font and I grabbed a “z” from there, and that’s how I have a mostly complete lowercase Latin alphabet, some uppercase, punctuation and even some diacritics.

The font I based this on is Franklin Gothic, which has even more characters than those that appear in the Greedo/Jabba text in any language. I used those characters to fudge any missing Latin characters and punctuation, using the appearance of the others for a best guess, and now I have a complete usable Latin alphabet, some diacritics, and a decent amount of punctuation.

That font also had Greek and Cyrillic characters, so technically, yes, you could use it to create Greek text. But – and this is important – that text will not match whatever font was used on Greek theatrical prints (because I don’t know which font was used, if any – the French and Italian prints for Star Wars used entirely different fonts, only Jedi used the same font we see on English prints) AND even if the Greek letters are kinda-sorta in the same style of the English matching fonts, they don’t have most of the customizations I did, because I only did that to the Latin characters.

So if you use the matching font, the Greek letters will look like a semi-bold Franklin Gothic Demi Condensed font, which is honestly probably pretty close to what you want. But the Greek letters won’t have the custom inter-letter spacing or rounded corners which really give that theatrical feel. But the punctuation will, and so will Greek letters that the font just references from the Latin characters, like “E”, “í” and “o”, which might make it look a little sloppy and haphazard when the two styles are all mixed together, even though they’re close.

You’d probably have a more consistent appearance by just using an unmodified Franklin Gothic font.
http://fontsgeek.com/fonts/Franklin-Gothic-Demi-Cond-Regular. It’s almost as good and certain to be more consistent.

Honestly your best non-technical route is to just change your playback software to use this font for subtitles. Size, position, and drop-shadow may not be right – but trying to render Greek subs in this new font and get the size, position, and drop-shadow just right is going to involve not only running all that custom code, but diving into the Python code and modifying some of the variables too. It’s not for the faint of heart.

But your question isn’t too far out there. We just had a situation where someone needed to render Greedo’s subtitles using the matching fonts in Navajo, and that was all custom work. But it was from an easier starting point, since Navajo uses Latin characters and just had a few diacritics that needed to be Photoshopped to match.

Now, if you have any idea what the Greedo and Jabba subs looked like in theatrical prints shown in Greece during their initial theatrical runs, then you might be able to help me (if you have photos/scans/bootlegs).